Web Design Articles
Understanding principles of website development will assist you to make better choices with regards to website content, layout and functionality.
Choosing fonts
There are many limitations to web design and reasons why it is not possible to simply convert and existing company brochure to electronic form. Many people fail to realize that unlike a brochure, a website is not a physical, unchangable entity but the way a website displays on a person's computer will depend on many factors; type of computer, type of browser and the individual settings chosen by the user. If you chose a font that is not supported by browser, your website could end up rendering in a string of zeros and ones instead of words. See Web safe fonts for a list of websafe fonts.
Accessibility and Compliance
In order to make the internet accessible to all people, standards in programming were introduced. W3C is an organisation that promotes accessibility in web design by publishing specifications and guidelines and providing tools and software. Many web designers do not follow these standards because it requires more technical skill and because it is more time consuming. Although unless you create a handwritten HTML website, it is virtually impossible to be standards compliant. Even our handcoded static HTML websites may due to design contraints, cross browser compatibility or the use of Flash are only able to achieve 99% compliancy but the fact is that we make an effort to ensure that our code is as compliant as possible. See XHTML Compliancy
Contact Us Page
Often overlooked and badly targetted the contact us page is second most important page in a company or organisation's website. Many companies make the misinformed assumption that visitors to their website will only use email to contact them and only list email contact details on the contact us page. Some company websites do not list physical addresses at all and this is a huge mistake because it is difficult to trust a company that only lists a postal address.See What to include on a contact us page